


Tengoku he Ikou ~Let’s go to Heaven~ (Gii in Manhattan Last Fall)

by koinuchan81



Series: Takumi-kun Series Perfect Edition vol.1 [1]
Category: Takumi-kun Series
Genre: BL, Boys’ Love, Gii has a savior complex, Gotoh Shinobu’s original work, In America, Light Novel, M/M, Takumi isn’t here, before they get together, mentions of contemplating suicide, translation of Japanese novel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-06 19:23:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15892491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koinuchan81/pseuds/koinuchan81
Summary: Six months before Gii becomes roommates with Takumi, he saves both a life and a relationship in New York.





	Tengoku he Ikou ~Let’s go to Heaven~ (Gii in Manhattan Last Fall)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a translation of the Takumi-kun Series Perfect Edition by Gotoh Shinobu. This is not my original work, but the translation is mine.

Did he want to kill himself?

I slowed down my jogging and headed towards the lake.

There, by the lake in Central Park with the Metropolitan Museum for a backdrop, a slightly dirty young man had been staring at the lake for the last fifteen minutes at least.

“I passed by here about fifteen minutes ago, I think.”

At the time, I had thought he was a birdwatcher or something, come to observe the morning wildlife. Now that I looked more closely at him, though, I realized that he didn’t really seem like one.

The main difference was the tilt of his upper body as he looked at the lake. Scientists and such tended to unconsciously lean further and further forward, trying to see better. People who were just lost in their thoughts don’t, perhaps just tilting their heads down. It didn’t matter if they were black, Asian or white, they were all the same.

His blond hair was dull and messy, as though it hadn’t been washed in days. His jeans had holes in the knees. The t-shirt was cheap, and looked like it would fall apart if you tugged on it.

Maybe he was from Soho. No, there weren’t unfashionable people living there anymore, I thought.

I’d felt like I might have a cold coming on since last night. What should I do… I wondered about it for a while.

“This area is off limits,” I called out.

The man startled, as though he had thought he was the only one left in the world after the apocalypse, and suddenly someone else showed up. He spun around, eyes wide, in surprise at my presence.

“I… I didn’t know.”

Oh. He was younger than I thought. He might even be younger than me.

“Workers will be by soon. You should come back over the fence before you get in trouble.”

He looked perplexed at my words, but he climbed over the fence with his long, thin legs readily enough.

He might be a little dirty, but he didn’t look too down and out.

What was he?

“Thank you for telling me. I didn’t know. When did it become off limits?”

“About fifteen minutes ago,” I laughed, and the boy furrowed his brow.

“That’s mean. You tricked me.”

“Not really. It’s just that that’s where the alligators come to eat every morning.” The boy’s face went white. “If you aren’t careful, you’ll end up alligator food.”

“Alligator food…”

“Would you rather I hadn’t told you?” 

The boy shook his head emphatically.

“Being eaten by an alligator is a horrible way to go,” he murmured as quietly as a mosquito’s whine.

“Are you a good swimmer?”

“Eh? Ah, no. I’m completely useless at it. I nearly drowned in a kiddie pool when I was little, so I can’t stand to be near water since.”

“Other than the bathtub, right?”

“Well, yeah, basically. I’m sure I’d sink like an anchor if I went in the water.”

“There’s this thing called buoyancy, though. Human bodies are actually fairly buoyant. ---unfortunate, huh?”

“Eh?” He looked at me in shock, clutching the fabric around the breast pocket of his t-shirt.

I reached into the pocket of my sweatpants.

“Oh, lucky. I have five dollars,” I laughed. “Just enough for two. How about a cup of coffee before you die? Or will the Grim Reaper be mad if you're late?”

He looked a little embarrassed. “I’m sure he’ll overlook it if I’m a little late,” he said.

 

*****

 

“How did you know I was contemplating suicide?”

We were sitting at a round table on the second floor of Bobby’s Café, watching the early businessmen making their way down the street while drinking our morning coffee.

“That seems to be a place that draws you when you're depressed. I find myself standing there from time to time, too.”

“Wanting to die?”

“When everything seems too awful to go on.”

“I see… But why did you stop a total stranger?”

“I didn’t want my cold to get worse.”

“?”

“No, wait. I suppose you could say I was beating you at your own game. Like fighting a cold by catching another one.”

Too bad. I should have waited till he went in the water.

“Who stopped you?” the boy asked.

“Nobody.” I gripped my mug tightly and gulped down my coffee. “Nobody stopped me.” 

I put the mug down with a clatter.

“Then how did you…”

“Talk myself out of killing myself? There was no way I could have done it in the first place.”

“…Hmm.” The boy rested his elbows on the table, bringing his coffee to his lips with both hands. “Isn’t that because you're a strong person?”

“No way,” I laughed shortly. “I’m just stubborn.”

“Stubborn, huh?”

“There’s something I want. That I intend to get. It’s not going very well, but that probably comes along with the stubbornness. That’s when I feel like I want to die. That’s what I see in the lake when I’m standing there.”

“By ‘that’, do you mean the person you like?”

“Yeah.”

“What are they like? Beautiful?”

Hey, now. Why were his eyes so sparkly now? Was this the same boy who wanted to kill himself not so long ago?

“I don’t really know them that well, since we’ve barely spoken to each other yet.”

“Have you told them how you feel yet?”

“No, not at all.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not brave enough. I can’t be honest about my feelings yet.”

“That’s pathetic. Sounds like me,” he laughed out of the corner of his mouth. He put down the mug and folded his hands. “Two years ago, I was taken in by the person I live with now. He’s young, but skillful enough to be headhunted by major corporations. Well, he’s thirty, but that’s still young. He has a lot of qualifications, and went to a really good school, too.”

“Did you have trouble with him?”

“Yeah, I guess. I guess you could say that.”

“Wouldn't trying to make up be better than dying?”

“I can’t,” the boy shrugged lightly. “Even if I wanted to, he doesn’t.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“I went back the day after I left, with the excuse that I’d forgotten something, to check in on him. There was some guy I didn’t know there. He acted like he’d been there for years when he told me that Jase had gone to work.”

“When was that?”

“Yesterday.” The boy raised his eyes towards the ceiling and sighed. “I figured out then why he’d kicked me out. But still, even if it was only two years, you don’t kick out someone you shared a roof with without so much as an explanation, right? I would have left if he’d told me he wanted to live with someone else.”

“And that’s what made you want to kill yourself? As a reason, it doesn’t have much impact.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No.”

“I don’t think that’s true. I was shocked. Of course, I was shocked when I was kicked out with only the clothes on my back, too, but that was okay. I mean, I’m an orphan, so I didn’t have that great a life before he took me in, but I made it work. No matter what happens from here on in, I’m confident I’ll have food to eat. Even so, I started thinking about what I should do, and for some reason Jase’s face keeps popping up, and I want to cry. I forgot what it meant to live. Just moving, making money, eating, sleeping. I thought that there should be more to life than that, but then the more optimistic I got, the emptier everything seemed, and I started to think that I would be better off dead.”

“You’re in love with Jase.”

“No way!” The boy turned bright red. “I mean, Jase is a guy. So am I, no matter how I look.”

“But that’s the only conclusion I could come to, listening to your story. Even if you are out on the streets, you're not worried about going hungry, right? That’s not the reason you want to kill yourself. You lost the will to live when you lost Jase.”

“But, I’m not gay…” The boy looked up at me imploringly. His troubled gaze reminded me of a certain someone.

Dammit. Now I really felt like helping him.

Oh, well. I’d already jumped on board, so to speak.

“But Jase is gay, Darren.”

He looked stunned at my declaration.

 

*****

 

“Thank you…”

The man who had ‘slipped and fallen’ into the lake took the mug of warm milk, folding his large body impossibly compactly.

A handsome face peered out from beneath the bath towel he had hanging over his head. It was a soft face, obviously well brought-up.

The other man ruffled the towel.

“Dry it well, loverboy. Wouldn’t want you to catch a cold,” James teased, crossing the living room. “Well then, Gii. I have a date. Make sure you lock up when you leave.”

“Sorry to just drop in on you like this, needing a change of clothes and everything.”

“It’s fine. They’re our own products, anyway. It suits you, Gii. If I didn’t have a date with Cheryl, I’d stay and have my evil way with you.”

“Men wouldn’t suit you, James. You’re good with your pretty models following you around,” I said, and James winked.

“You’re young, but I can’t get one past you. Fine. Instead, go out to eat with me at least once while you're here.”

“Gladly.”

“Don’t forget. Make yourself at home, too, loverboy number two over there,” the owner of the apartment said, leaving it behind and disappearing into the Manhattan night.

I had chosen James’ apartment because it was a mere thirty second walk from Central Park. Two wet men didn’t want to walk amongst the dressed-up New Yorkers out for a night on the town.

Also, James wouldn’t try to interfere.

“You're quite far apart in age to be friends,” the man said, surprised.

“He’s the same age as my father,” I responded, and he seemed even more surprised.

“You’re a strange kid,” he laughed.

“Right back at you. Managing to climb over a five foot wall with no problem, only to slip and fall into the lake takes special talent.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I really did slip, though.”

“That may be so.”

“I really did.”

“Sure you did.”

“---I don’t really want to die…” he dropped his gaze to his mug. “Something was wrong with me. I’ll admit that. Something was wrong.”

“I think the same could be said for people who want to kill themselves, to some extent.”

“I let things get beyond repair over something so silly,” he murmured, still staring at his mug. “I don’t think he’ll ever come back to me.”

“Did you have a fight and break up with your lover?”

“I met Darren when I was volunteering in back in college. He had lost his parents in a car accident when he was two, and was raised in an orphanage. He couldn’t have had an easy life, but he was such a carefree child. He was like an angel.”

“You a pedo?” I wasn’t comfortable with that.

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s good.”

“But I’m not interested in women.”

Hey, now!

“I visited the orphanage many times. I really wanted him to come home with me, so I worked hard to get the qualifications I needed, and to overcome the handicap of being unmarried. Finally, two years ago, I was able to take him home.”

“You adopted him?”

“No, I left all the legalities as they were. I wanted him to be able to decide for himself when he became an adult. So, I’m just a foster parent.”

“What do you think Darren thinks of you as?”

“A benefactor.” A fast, concise answer.

“And you?”

“I…” he frowned, looking lonely. “Do you know ‘My Fair Lady’? Not the movie. The original.”

“Ah, yeah.”

“Professor Higgins, was it? That pretentious guy. ---That’s how I feel.”

The Lady who didn’t come back.

And Darren, who left.

“The night he left, he didn’t come back even till morning. No matter how worried I was, I still had to go to work. Darren had left without his key, so the next day, I had my little brother come stay at the apartment, but Darren didn’t come back. He only had a few coins in his pocket. I shouldn’t have scolded him over something so silly. I only kicked him out as a light punishment…”

“You seem like a pretty easy-going guy, but you're actually pretty impatient.”

“Impatient?”

“How do you get from ‘he’s been gone for two days’ to ‘I’ll never see him again’? If you think like that, then by now, I wouldn’t see my own parents again even if I was reborn a hundred times. Just by living, there’s a chance you’ll meet again. If you kill yourself, Heaven isn’t necessarily waiting for you. If you die, no matter how much you wish for it, even if miracles were possible, you’ll definitely never see him again.”

“You…” he raised his head slowly.

“Not ‘you’. Call me Gii. You?”

“I’m Jase. Jase Kettner.”

I followed our handshake with a resounding sneeze.

 

*****

 

“So? What happened to those two, then?” My lovely childhood friend asked from across the line.

I was on an international call to Japan. I should get a certificate or something.

“Well, it seems they figured out their misunderstanding.”

“So Darren went back to Jase’s place?” Sachi loved a happy ending.

“I’m not sure I’m happy about it, though,” I complained.

“Why? They feel the same way about each other, right?”

“That may be true, but do you know what kind of guy Jase has to be to live with the object of his affections every day, and not lay a hand on him?”

“A patient one.”

“Well put, Sachi, but that’s actually the biggest problem.”

“Really?”

“The reason he won’t do anything is because Darren is underage.”

“Sounds like someone we know,” Sachi chuckled.

“Darren doesn’t think that’s important.”

“Neither do I.”

“Come on, Sachi. Don’t make this about you.”

“Sorry, Giichi-kun.” His laughter didn’t make his apology seem very sincere.

“I ended up having to give them both advice every day.” I just had to go and save them.

“What’s wrong with that? Just call it an after-service.”

“Don’t be stupid. I just ended up listening to them waxing poetic about each other over and over.”

You could call it a coincidence, but…

“You should get back at them by doing your own waxing.”

“And who would I be waxing on about?”

Those two seemed more connected to each other than I was to anyone in my acquaintance. 

“That’s obvious,” Sachi laughed.

The one person I was thinking about in the whole wide world. If it were possible, he was the one person I wanted to be connected to like that. I wanted to be connected to him by a mysterious power like they were. If that could happen, I’d be in Heaven on Earth.

 

*****


End file.
